


Hot for Teacher

by Anonymous



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-20
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 01:19:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire finds himself drawn to his incredibly hot political science teacher for more reasons than the obvious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Name and describe a cause of the Paris Uprising of 1832_

Grantaire's paper is blank, though not for lack of words. Words he has in plenty - even words about boring, failed revolutions - but something more interesting is brewing up at the front of the class: someone is passing notes again. The little folded bit of paper has no sooner landed on Marius's desk than Mr. Enjolras slinks up like a ghost behind him.

 _"Mister_ Pontmercy," he says, and the sudden snap of his voice makes everyone jump but Grantaire, who is always, always aware of where Enjolras is and what he's doing. He leans forward to watch. "What, can I ask, is more important than your work today?"

No doubt it's a girl, but that's not the interesting part. Marius's freckled ears have gone bright red as the teacher picks the unread note out of his hands; that's cute enough in its way, but he really only has eyes for the way Enjolras goes all stern and deadly serious, his lips pressing together in a disapproving line. What would be laughable earnestness on any of their other teachers somehow _fits_ on him.

Maybe it's the way Enjolras seems to expect their undivided interest instead of trying to coax it out of them, he thinks, watching him flick open Marius's note - an _oooh_ of shame echoes around the class - and read it silently. He crumples it when he's done and sends a look of pure and utter disdain at Marius, a look that has Grantaire's mouth drying up in mixed sympathy and jealousy. Maybe it's just that Enjolras is the hottest man on the face of the fucking planet.

"Two minutes left." Enjolras returns to the desk at the front of the class, tossing Marius's love letter into the trash on the way.

Grantaire reluctantly looks back down at his pop quiz. He considers writing: _All the revolutionaries really needed a good hard fucking_. 

This would probably (definitely) get him detention. Grantaire has watched a hundred pornos that start like that - well, not precisely like _that_ , but close enough. He imagines himself sprawled over Enjolras's desk, all the carefully stacked tests and books knocked to the floor. Enjolras would be stood over him, staring down at him with that same look he'd just given Marius, but his lips swollen red from kissing, his hair falling in messy curls over flinty eyes - he'd say _How long are you going to waste my time? Do you think I have all day?_ and Grantaire would unbutton his jeans--

"One minute."

He considers writing his phone number. This is stupid, because Enjolras, being his teacher, probably has access to the school's records. He thinks about it again anyway: Enjolras's low whisper in his ear late at night, Grantaire cradling his cellphone in one hand, the other down his boxers and wrapped tight around his cock, squeezing the base just a little too hard for that tiny spike of pain so that he'll last longer, be able to hear more. So that he'll be able to hold on until Enjolras tells him he can come.

In the end he sketches a 30-second rendition of _Liberty Leading the People_ which is _technically_ an answer to the question and yet not at all what Enjolras wants, and then passes his sheet up with the others' to the front of the row. Hopefully it will be annoying enough to make Enjolras notice him.

But he doesn't grade the quizzes in class, which is both good and bad: the anticipation is a fucking killer and since it's Friday he'll have to live with it all weekend, but it gives Grantaire time to cool off enough so that when the bell rings and he makes his way to the door it's without the world's most visible hardon. He punches Marius playfully in the shoulder on the way out the door; he's still blushing, although he's laughing now, too, that sort of embarrassed little chuckle he gets whenever anyone teases him about whatever the hell weird threesome thing he has going on with both the hottest girls in school.

Lucky bastard, Grantaire thinks, but he's not thinking about Eponine and Cosette. "You gonna ask him which of your girls that was from?" he says.

"You're joking, right?"

"Maybe you could sneak it out of the trash," someone else puts in.

"He'd murder me," Marius says, which meets general agreement before the class splits up in the hall.

 

Grantaire stops by his locker before art to swap textbooks (he has homework, but he'll pass if he doesn't do it and it's the weekend, so he's not going to bother) for his sketchbooks.

Inside the studio, the tables have been shoved around to make room for a low platform in the center of the room. _Property of PHS Theater Department, DO NOT STEAL_ is scrawled across the side; Grantaire wonders idly if Ms. Toussaint bothered to ask before borrowing it. He scouts out a place with decent light and view where no one can see over his shoulder and settles down as the others filter in.

He's always been good at gesture drawing, at catching quick motion and form, although when it gets to the finer details he usually doesn't care enough to _live up to his potential_ , according to just about everyone ever. Today, though, it's a different problem; something's really off with him, and it's not the different spot in the room.

Grantaire realizes halfway through the period that he's swirled distinctive not-quite-long, not-quite-short curls across every head, that the bodies have the sort of perfect symmetry and form that today's model sadly lacks: that he's been drawing Enjolras the whole time.

It's not a big deal so far as school goes - probably no one will even look at them, much less care whether they're accurate or not - but he doesn't care about that anyway. All it means to Grantaire is he has it _bad_ , worse than he'd thought. He flips the page and starts over, trying to pretend that he doesn't suddenly have the idea of Enjolras up there posing for them stuck in his head. 

The model shifts, back arching dramatically, and Grantaire scribbles out the suggestion of Enjolras's hair _again_ , completely without meaning to. "Fuck," he says under his breath.

He sucks his lower lip into his mouth and bites down to keep from saying it again, staring down at his half-finished sketch; he's suddenly not in the mood for drawing anymore. 

There's a strip of skin visible between the sloppy triangle of shirt and the hint of jeans. If he was going to draw Enjolras he'd want him nude, Grantaire thinks. Not that he doesn't want Enjolras naked _all the time_ , but even if he couldn't touch him, even if it had to be just art, he'd want to see every bit, to trace each hard, sculpture-perfect muscle with his pencil the way he'd be dying to do it with his hands. It wouldn't be enough - Grantaire is beginning to doubt that he will ever have enough of Enjolras - but it would be something more than what he's got right now. 

Even Grantaire has enough self-control to not _actually_ draw nudes of his teachers in the middle of class, though with the images flashing through his head it's a close thing. After a few minutes of not drawing he intercepts a significant look from Ms. Toussaint and reluctantly puts pencil back to paper before she comes over to see what he's doing - or worse, try to encourage him.

This time he doesn't even try to draw anyone else.

 

When the bell rings, Grantaire lets his head fall back, hitting the window behind him with a thud. Friday afternoon and here he is, wishing he had detention; that little scene he'd imagined last period had come back with a vengeance when the model had stood up and braced himself half-bent over a chair. He hadn't gone quite so far as to imagine himself in a plaid skirt, but his mind and his dick both had a few things to say about Enjolras, a ruler, and his ass.

He sighs and packs his things back away, then slides a hand into his pocket to stealthily adjust himself before standing. Just that little touch sends a shudder through him; he is _not_ looking forward to the bus ride looming ahead.

On the way out, he wonders suddenly what Marius might be willing to give if he got that note back. Everyone knows Marius and his parents have more money than God, and fuck knows Grantaire doesn't.

It's an excuse, he knows it. It's a stupid, shitty excuse: there's no way Enjolras would give him the note if he's there - and if he's not and Grantaire gets caught rooting around near his desk, there'll really be trouble.

He could get suspended.

He could get a year's worth of detention.

He turns away from the exit back towards the Politics classroom.

 

The hallways are emptying of people; Grantaire's the lone fish swimming upstream. By the time he gets there, there's no one left hanging around to see him sidle up and peer around the edge of the open door.

The classroom is empty, but Enjolras's coat is thrown over the back of his chair, his desk still cluttered. Grantaire slips inside. He won't have long; probably Enjolras is down the hall in the copy room or something.

He closes the door behind himself - if Enjolras gets back too soon, it'll give him a second or two of warning - and quickly crosses to the trash can, kneeling down to sort through it. Some torn-up scraps, a couple broken pens, another intercepted note (seriously, you'd think people would learn) and, _aha_ , there: Grantaire smooths out the crumpled paper to reveal Eponine's familiar chickenscratch. He snatches it up and shoves it in his back pocket just as footsteps stop outside the door.

Scrambling away, he makes it safely into the rows of desks as Enjolras opens the door and comes in, a mug of coffee in his hand. He looks at Grantaire and quirks an eyebrow.

"Forgot my pencil," Grantaire says, standing up. It's the first excuse that comes to mind as not being either wholly unbelievable or unbelievably obscene. Or both.

Enjolras passes the trash without looking down, without noticing that anything's different, and sets his coffee on the desk. "We can't have that," he says. "The artist without his tool."

Grantaire's hard enough just being in the same damn room alone with Enjolras without Enjolras saying things like _tool_ , or calling him an artist -- oh shit. Oh shit, he must have looked at the quizzes already. He licks his lips while Enjolras is looking at his desk, shuffling through the papers. "No day without a line," he says, and palms a pencil stub stealthily out of his pocket so that when Enjolras looks up at him, it's in his hand as if he had just found it.

"I'd like it better if you _wrote_ a line or two," Enjolras says, taking up a sheet - Grantaire's quiz - from the midst of them and waving it at him. Marianne flirts from the paper as it twists and he suddenly hopes that he had managed to draw her, at least, without any stray curls.

"For those kind of lines you should ask a poet," says Grantaire, "or else see if they'll hire you as an English teacher."

Enjolras is watching him: not with the scorn he'd treated Marius to, or the almost-friendly looks he sometimes shares with the closest thing he's got to a teacher's pet. It's somewhere between disappointment and interest. Grantaire is used to disappointment enough that it only bores him, but from Enjolras he will take anything. "You don't need to be a poet to answer one question," he says.

He twists the pencil between his fingers, something, anything to keep his hands busy. "That depends on what the question is, don't you think?" Grantaire says. "And on the poet."

"Indulge me," Enjolras says.

 _Gladly_ , Grantaire thinks, and reminds himself: breathe. Do not fall over. Absolutely do not come in your pants.

He continues: "Answer the question, so I don't have to fail you."

Grantaire nods at the paper. "I did," he says.

Enjolras waits, obviously unamused. He makes it look good.

The thing is, Grantaire knows the answer Enjolras wants to hear, the one they've gone over and over in class: he could talk about cholera and the economy and Lamarque, about republicans and monarchists and patriotism and all of that until they were both tired of listening to his voice, and maybe in a way that would be an answer. It's not his answer, though, because although he knows it backwards and forwards, it _means_ nothing to him, it's a mess of words with no image and no purpose, like a horse with feathers.

"Some people will follow her anywhere," he says instead, "over barricades and corpses, through revolution after revolution."

"Liberty?" Enjolras sounds almost surprised by the answer, as if he hadn't expected to hear such a thing from him.

Grantaire shrugs. "Liberty, Patria, any figurehead they can find to convince themselves they have anything at all."

Enjolras's lips quirk slightly. "Always the cynic," he says. "There was more to the uprisings than demagoguery."

"For the demagogues," Grantaire says, "but what about for the rabble?"

"The rabble." Enjolras's voice, normally inspired and smooth and all that, does this thing in just those two words with disbelief and a twist of sarcasm that Grantaire, for all he can talk when he gets going, can't begin to describe. 

He tries to focus on the argument; imagines he's borrowing some of Enjolras's cool, puts his hand down on the edge of the desk nearest him, leans his weight on it. It's insultingly casual - he can see it in the way Enjolras looks at him, his eyes narrowing as if he's almost ready to call him out on it. "A revolution for the people," he says, "yeah? For the Republic and the right of the people to be free, without a king, for the betterment of the citizens. But what does it matter if someone starves under tricolore or white? People don't change; governments don't change. They change their names, they change their stripes, but they never change their spots. Does it matter if the tyrant is called a King or an Emperor or a President when he'll always do the same things, only hidden in different ways? So there was a revolution. There was one before that and one after that. And they were full of people swearing that this time, things will be different, if only you fight for me. For _my_ vision, for _my_ future. And when some people say it, someone else will always follow. But it's all sound and fury."

"Signifying nothing." Enjolras is apparently unable to decide whether to be annoyed or disappointed.

Grantaire shrugs. Either is all right with him. "Meet the old boss," he says. "Same as the new boss."

"Liberty is the birthright of mankind." He seems to have settled on annoyed. "Striving for that is not striving for nothing. It's the base and the form on which the social contract is framed. It is an end in itself. We've discussed this; I know you know the theory."

\--He's not exactly known for his grades or for paying attention, but Enjolras knows he listens to him, has been watching Grantaire watching _him_ \--

And then, before he can quite process that, Enjolras is stalking towards him, closing the distance between them until he's no more than a foot away, staring at Grantaire face to face, eye to eye. _"Renoncer à sa liberté, c’est renoncer à sa qualité d’homme, aux droits de l’humanité, même à ses devoirs,"_ he says, his tongue curling flawlessly, sensually around the words. His eyes shine, gleaming with a passion that Grantaire knows - objectively - is belief, all virtue, all pure.

But Grantaire wants nothing more than to lean in and kiss the words out of his mouth. He wants to fall to his knees in front of him and have Enjolras keep talking, to let that fervor, those words in that voice wash over him while he serves. He would turn his back on what little liberty means to him, on being a man, a human, just for this much, for one taste - and he knows that's exactly what Enjolras is trying to tell him not to do.

For once in his life his voice fails him; he stands paralyzed, lips parted but breath caught in his throat, and finds nothing to say. Somehow, in some fucked up way, he's tangled himself in the trap of his own words; he knows in his gut that if Enjolras told him to get up on a barricade and get himself shot for Liberté, he would do it just like that. He still doesn't believe. He can't, that's too much to ask, all of his rhetoric is ridiculous and full of optimism about humanity that's just patently untrue, that's contradicted by thousands of years of people leading nasty, brutish, short lives and a world, a future that is obviously never going to change.

Grantaire would do it anyway. His mind unhelpfully fills in the end of Rousseau's paragraph: absolute authority and unlimited obedience. Right now, it sounds good to him, and if that makes him just another sheep he doesn't give a damn.

Enjolras stays too close, searching Grantaire's face for something Grantaire is pretty sure he's not going to find. "Think about it," he says at last, and pushes the ungraded quiz against Grantaire's chest with two fingers that almost knock him right over.

He instinctively raises a hand, takes the paper, and the moment is gone; Enjolras is turning away, headed back to the front of the classroom. Grantaire shoves the paper into his pocket and flees before he can do anything irretrievably stupid.


	2. Chapter 2

He doesn't get very far: out into the hallway, putting a wall safely between them, then a few feet down the hall and he's turning into the bathroom. It's late enough in the day that no one's there, everyone's gone home and the janitors haven't got here yet, and Grantaire sags against the wall, dropping his backpack to the floor.

"Fuck," he says to the empty room. It echoes off the tiles and he says it again, devoutly: " _Fuck._ "

How did it get this far? It had been one thing to just watch Enjolras, to think about him in class and maybe sometimes when he was jerking off, but this - it's something else. Grantaire runs his hands through his hair, stares into the mirrors over the sinks: somehow he looks normal, just like he always does. He doesn't feel normal at all. He feels destroyed, consumed, eaten up from the inside with something terrifyingly more than lust, something he doesn't readily have - and is too scared to invent - a name for.

Not that lust isn't there, though, oh no. He'd thought he'd wanted it before, but now he feels like he could come just from the friction of his jeans when he _breathes_. This isn't something he can just wait out, not anymore. Not fueled as it is by the memory of Enjolras's hand on him, those blazing eyes so close, looking right into him, _seeing_ him. 

It's pathetic, it's humiliating; what choice does he have? Grantaire is practically limping as he heads for the last stall, hands already on the buttons of his jeans as he swings the door shut behind him and leans against it. He hisses aloud as he eases the zipper down and frees his cock, the easing of pressure a relief that's the next thing to pain. His boxers are fucking clinging to him, a wide soaked patch of pre-come against the head of his cock, and when he pulls them down he has to grit his teeth and close his eyes to keep from making a noise as the cloth peels wetly away. He shoves his jeans a few inches further down his hips with one hand and stretches the elastic waist of his underwear down under his balls with the other. The pressure is firm, steady, relentless; he can imagine Enjolras making him touch himself like this, telling him to keep his hands off his cock.

The thought is almost too much all on its own; his hands ball up into fists so tight that his nails dig deep into his palms and it's still all he can do to keep them away from himself, obeying the imaginary command. There's a little voice in the back of his head that's telling him to hurry up and come, to not run the risk of being caught, but never has good sense been so, _so_ easy to ignore.

He imagines it, paints the picture in his mind of how it could have been, if he had dropped to his knees in front of Enjolras like he'd wanted to, the paper fallen forgotten between them. He'd have pressed his face to Enjolras's leg, feeling the strength of his thigh through the crisp cloth, daring higher and higher until he was nuzzling at his crotch: Enjolras would have said _If you can't speak and won't write, what good are you?_ and Grantaire would have said _Let me show you_. He'd have undone Enjolras' pants but left his underwear, mouthed at him through it till the cloth was soaked through and every touch of lip and tongue went through it easy as air, til he could taste skin and salt past the harshness of cotton, till Enjolras's cock was as wet as Grantaire's is now. He'd be so hard as he is now, harder, and he'd go to touch himself, just to rub a hand across the front of his jeans, and Enjolras would step back, leaving Grantaire's mouth empty, searching, desperate. _Choose,_ he'd say, and Grantaire would crawl forwards after him without thinking about it at all.

He lifts a hand to his mouth, tastes the faint stickiness of his own precome on his fingers, slowly slides two in, rubbing against his teeth, pressing down. Enjolras's cock would be bigger, thicker, heavier. He'd let him suck it for a little while, sliding it slowly over Grantaire's tongue, pressing it hard into his cheek until the stretch of his mouth was almost pain. 

Grantaire would welcome that, the too-tight pull at his skin, the chill of the linoleum floor under his knees: little distracting flashes of pain holding him back from the edge, letting him focus on giving Enjolras all he can. He imagines Enjolras's hand tangling in his hair, fingers winding through shaggy curls and pulling hard and harder, giving Grantaire more of what he wants without him even having to ask, without him _deserving_ it - just because Enjolras can. Because it's his to decide what Grantaire gets and how; it's him who chooses what to give and what to hold back. So when he'd finally let Grantaire have more than the first inch or two, when he'd shift forward and fill Grantaire's mouth right up, all the way to the back of his throat til he almost gagged on it - it would be a privilege, a gift. 

He'd do as best he could, swirling his tongue at the shaft, sucking till his stinging cheeks hollowed, rounding his lips over his teeth just so. And no, Enjolras would pull out anyway, dragging Grantaire off his cock by the hair, and just look down at him with that distant, almost pitying look.

Please, Grantaire would say; his lips form the word here and now, around the muffle of his fingers, and the only thing keeping it unvoiced is that he can barely breathe at all from the crushing weight of the need wrapped around his chest like iron bands. Please.

_What are you asking for?_ Enjolras would say. _Tell me what you can do for me._ He would know, it would be clear in his eyes, in the tilt of his perfect, unmarked lips, exactly how much Grantaire wanted his dick; he'd take himself in one hand, the other still too tight in Grantaire's hair, and stroke himself slowly, teasingly, his skin wet and slick with Grantaire's spit. He wouldn't even be breathing fast, and Grantaire would take just a little too long in admiring that iron control. Enjolras would pull his head back, slowly, baring his throat until Grantaire dragged his eyes back off his dick and looked him in the face, and then - when Grantaire's eyes were on his - he'd slowly, slowly wipe just the head of his cock over Grantaire's bruised mouth, sliding it across his swollen-wet lips, across his cheek, leaving a filthy mess of precome and spit smeared all the way to the line of his jaw.

Please, he mouths again to empty air. He's trembling with the effort of keeping his hand at his side, his cock so hard it's nearly touching his shirt; he's been holding it back so long, waiting for this, that it half looks like someone's been sucking _his_ dick, leaving thick wet streaks behind. The second he gives in and touches himself it'll be over; his cock jerks at the thought and he fumbles at the edge of the stall for a wad of toilet paper.

What words would convince Enjolras?

Maybe the truth: _Everything_ , he'd do anything and everything Enjolras wanted - anything, to get one more taste, to feel Enjolras's control bend and slip, to swallow his come. _Use me,_ he'd say. _Let me suck your cock, please, I can do it. Fuck my mouth, I can take it, I can take anything._

Enjolras would make him wait again, his cock hard and dripping against Grantaire's jaw, the smell of him so close making Grantaire almost dizzy with hunger, until he couldn't stand it any longer, until it was almost cruel, and then he'd say _One more chance, Grantaire_ \- and hold himself steady so that Grantaire could wrap his lips around his cock again, sucking hard, tonguing over the slit to catch every drop he could, and then Enjolras would pull him all the way down again, without stopping, ramming his cock down Grantaire's throat until there was no more--

He can't take it anymore, pulls spit-slick fingers from his mouth and wraps them tight around his dick. It hits him like lightning, nearly knocking him from his feet; he leans heavily against the door, turning his head aside, his hand sliding up and back, just that once, and he's coming so hard that he can't hear over the roaring in his ears, can barely see, so hard that the clench of his balls is more pain than pleasure. The stabbing pangs of it linger, electric tingles sending tremors through his arms, his thighs; if it wasn't for the door holding him up, he's pretty sure he'd be on the floor.

Grantaire forces himself to breathe again, deep and quiet, until the haze slowly fades away, until his hands are steady and his knees feel less like water. He throws the paper in the toilet, grabs some more and cleans up better; by the time he's got his jeans up and re-zipped, he's feeling almost all right.

He lets himself out of the stall, thankful to whatever luck fairies are with him that there's still no one else, no feet under the other doors, and crosses over to the sinks to wash his hands. Glancing up, he catches a look at himself in the mirrors again and now he _does_ look different; flushed, breathless, his lips reddened from the press of his fingers. He looks all fucked out, like he's been sucking cock for real instead of just dreaming about it.

There's no way he's going to get it up again right away, but that doesn't mean his dick doesn't try; it twitches in his pants like he hadn't just practically come his brains out, an empty, hollow feeling curling in the pit of his stomach, something that wants to be arousal but isn't quite making it there.

He takes another slow breath, lets it out as a sigh, forces himself to meet his own eyes in the mirror. "You're so screwed," he tells himself, and then bends down to splash cold water on his face. It'll help with the blush, at least, if not the rest; he straightens, wipes his face dry on his arm, examines himself again. Better. Probably no one will notice.

In another small blessing the hall is still empty when he grabs his backpack and sticks his head out - he _does not_ think about meeting Enjolras like this, he doesn't - and he heads out. He passes the guidance counselor, his arms full of printouts, on the way: "Detention _again?_ " but manages to escape with a well-practiced shrug-and-smile. If his luck holds as well as it has been lately, he'll be too busy to check up after him. 

 

Outside it's warm: bright and still sunny with a bit of breeze, the afternoon feeling more like late summer than early fall. Grantaire stands on the sidewalk for a while, face into the wind, just enjoying the air, the freedom; outside the close halls, he feels better, more himself, less like his mind is falling endlessly, unavoidably towards Enjolras.

He picks at that as he walks; now, with a clearer mind, more distance, more time, it's slightly easier to think about Enjolras without immediately thinking of sex. (Slightly.) Still, it takes him most of the long walk home to concede even to himself that it had been the passion in Enjolras's eyes, the strength in his voice, his untarnished unshakable belief in the impossible. Grantaire, who has been thoroughly disillusioned about the nature of humanity for basically as long as he can remember, is in - in lust with a _true believer_. It's fucking ridiculous.

But he wonders, as he rounds the corner and shoves a hand in his pocket, pulling out his house key - what would it be like, to be Enjolras? To believe in people, in the future, with that kind of fire? Grantaire can't imagine it, can't even lay a finger on the idea; maybe that's why he wants it - him - so much. He's never gone in much for sour grapes unless they're safely in a bottle.

And speak of the devil: he's no sooner raised key to door when there's a shattering crash from inside. Glass, he thinks detachedly, maybe porcelain; it's followed immediately by the thicker, harder sound of breaking wood, and then the yelling starts.

Grantaire sticks the key back in his pocket and heads around the side of the house; he knows better than to walk into that once it's on. His window doesn't lock right and he long ago learned how to stick it just so that it looks shut but can be easily jimmied open from the outside if you know the trick of it, so it's not as if the front door being off limits is a real problem. He listens at the window, just in case; the noise, while still audible, is mostly muffled, so he slides it up and tosses his backpack in, climbing in after it.

By the sound of things, he might as well look for something else to do for the night. Dumping the contents of his backpack out on the bed, he picks out one of his smaller sketchbooks and a pencil box and puts them back, leaving the rest where it lies. A nearby pile of clothes yields a hoodie and a clean-ish shirt that pass the sniff test, so he crams them in, squashed down at the bottom to make room for more important things. 

Under his bed, behind the defensive line of dirty laundry and old papers, tucked into a slash in the boxspring, Grantaire finds his shoebox undisturbed. Pulling it out, he flips it open and eyes the half-empty bottle of Popov inside. It'll do, he decides, and pours carefully into his water bottle, topping it up. There's not much left when it's full, barely a shot; not enough to be worth the risk of keeping the bottle in his room. He knocks the remainder back in one rough swallow and packs both bottles. 

That settled, he digs Eponine's note out of his pocket, stashing it in the now-emptied shoebox for safekeeping. Then, on second thought, he pulls out the quiz, too. He unfolds it, looks down at the sketch, wonders: if he had just written what Enjolras wanted, would he be so fucked in the head? Could he have just gone on daydreaming about sexy detentions if he hadn't seen Enjolras so close, so intense, so real?

Maybe; maybe not. Probably he'd have got in trouble at some point, or Enjolras would have got sick of his shit eventually, and then it would have come out. Grantaire flips the quiz over, checking the back in case Enjolras had written anything there, but it's blank. There's something reassuring about the idea that Enjolras had said everything he had to say right to Grantaire's face, though, even if maybe Grantaire tucks away the idea of _'See me after class'_ into the back of his mind for later.

Smoothing the crumples out of the paper, he folds it in half and chucks it in on top of Eponine's note, then fits the lid over the box and crawls back under the bed with it before he can think too much about what it means that he's keeping it safe and hidden when it isn't worth anything at all.

Once he's got everything rearranged, he sits down next to his backpack, pulls out his cell, and thoughtfully flicks through the contact list. He'd try Marius - the retrieved love note does mean he owes him one - but his parents and his granddad are ridiculously strict, and right now Grantaire wants a place to relax more than a place to crash. Besides, when it comes down to it, since he's down to the last of his bottles, he'd rather trade in that favor for money than either. And then Jehan is out for similar parental reasons; Joly'd been out sick from school all week... He gets all the way through to the end of the list and comes up with nothing likely.

As he does, there's another, closer crash, and Grantaire's eyes flick involuntarily to his bedroom door. There's nothing there yet, not even the sound of footsteps closing in, but he grabs up his pack and heads out the window anyway, closing it carefully behind himself. No point tempting fate when he doesn't have to; besides, there's a few hours left before dark. Something might turn up; if it doesn't, well, it won't be the first warm night he's slept outside.

He starts walking again with no real aim at first, though after a few minute he heads for the park, digging the empty vodka bottle out of his bag and tossing it in a convenient stranger's garbage bin along the way. There are always people there on nice days; that'll be something to do.

There's a frisbee game going when he gets there, a bunch of kids tossing it around and screaming at each other; Grantaire settles down at the foot of a tree near the bike path, pack at his side, and starts sketching. A girl jumping, a guy eating dirt missing a catch, an old lady out jogging. Just quick motion sketches, each one chased by a drink or two until his hands loosen up and the sharp ragged edges of the day starts to feel acceptably blunted. He flips the page and leans back into a stretch, shaking out his arms and shoulders. The kids are starting to trickle home as evening falls, but there's still enough light to draw.


End file.
